AF Group – Ringroad West Bergen

About 24,000 vehicles pass the Straume Bridge on Ringroad West outside Bergen on an average weekday. An old road, it is not suited to this volume of traffic, and in 2006, work begun on phase one of the new Ringroad West.

Both very important and prestigious, the project is a joint effort between The Norwegian Public Roads Administration (NPRA), and the local county and municipality governments. Once complete, the road will both be better and safer. In addition, a large part of the road will be in tunnels, meaning less noise and air pollution for local communities.

The second phase of the project, underway now, will cover ten kilometres, of which eight will be in tunnels. There will be one tunnel in each direction, both with two lanes.

The contract for the second phase of construction was awarded to the company AF Group, a large contracting group with 2600 employees in Norway, Sweden, China and Great Britain. Surveying manager with AF Group, Harald Juvland, is working on the project.

Juvland has worked in contracting since 1998 and first started using Powel’s Gemini solutions in 2006. Today, he and his colleagues nearly exclusively use Gemini 3D Terreng (Terrain) and Entreprenør (Contractor) for their projects, as the two unique solutions cover most of their working processes.

The 3D solutions allows you to make detailed calculations of dirt and rock excavations, and AF Group were able to put all details and plans from NPRA straight into Gemini. “From the drawings, we built models in Gemini of all aspects of the projects - roundabouts, curbs, the tunnels themselves and so on,” says Juvland.

The Ringroad West project is a paper based drawing project, but the contractor get some digital road models. AF Group used Gemini Terreng and Entreprenør when digitising these drawing and put it together with the road models. They were then able to do a complete mass calculation on the project and reported the volumes according to the specification text given by the NPRA. All the ‘as built’ data were also collected, computed and delivered within the Gemini solution.

The portal of the architect-designed tunnels have an unusual and particular design, adding to the complexity of the actual tunnel building and the rest of the road.

“The entrance to the tunnel was technically complicated,” says Juvland. “It looked great on the drawings, but it was not easy to build. We used Gemini and managed to get the correct model and stakeout data. The result was a perfect arch, just as designed by the architect.”

For this project, AF Group have used Gemini throughout. Juvland says that “sometimes it is hard to understand how we managed before Gemini.”

AF Group is due to complete phase two of the project by mid-2015. Once the third and final phase is completed, the new road is set to change the lives of commuters making the journey every rush hour.